Mobilize the Power of the Working
Class
to Defeat the Militarized Popular Front

Brazil:
Reformists Tail After “Strike” By
Military Firemen in Rio de Janeiro

Militarized police and firemen
march together in June 12 parade along
Copacabana beachfront. The militarized
firemen are also auxiliary forces of the
repressive apparatus of the bourgeois
state. (Photo:
SOS Bombeiros)

JUNE 30 – The
occupation of the headquarters of the
Military Fire Corps of the State of Rio de
Janeiro by striking firemen on the night
of June 3 not only unleashed a clash with
the authoritarian state government of
Sérgio Cabral Jr., but also a
political struggle inside the workers
movement. The main tendencies to the left
of the governing Workers Party (PT) of
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – namely
the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL)
and the United Socialist Workers Party
(PSTU), particularly the latter – are
ostentatiously backing the movement of the
Rio firemen. As the leading forces in the
teachers union of Rio de Janeiro
(SEPE-RJ), they have linked a strike at
schools in the Rio state network to the
action of the militarized firemen (bombeiros
militares, their official title).
However, intervening in union assemblies
and with a leaflet, the Comitê de
Luta Classista (CLC – Class Struggle
Caucus), linked to the Liga
Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB –
Fourth-Internationalist League of Brazil),
has sharply criticized the posture of the
leadership for feeding dangerous illusions
in these auxiliary forces of the
repressive apparatus of the Brazilian
state.

The repression of
the firemen by Rio’s “governator” is
typical for this politician who likes to
present an iron-fisted image, and of the
coalition state government of his PMDB
(Party of the Brazilian Democratic
Movement) and the PT which he leads.
Fearing that elements of the Shock Brigade
(of the militarized state police) might
refuse to repress their firemen
“comrades,” Cabral sent the Special
Operations Battalion (BOPE), to carry out
an operation like those in the movie Tropa
de Elite (Elite Squad), using tear
gas, percussion grenades and rifle fire.
Some 439 firemen were jailed in the
largest mass arrest in the city’s history.
He also denounced the mutinous firemen as
“cowards, vandals and irresponsible
criminal elements.” In response to the
arrests, a front was formed of
parliamentary parties from right to “left”
which introduced bills to the state and
federal legislatures to amnesty the
militarized firemen. The authors included
conservative PR (Republic Party) spokesman
and former Rio state governor Anthony
Garotinho, as well as leaders of the PT
and PSOL (Chico Alencar), the right-wing
Democrats and the social-democratic
Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCdoB). Even
Cabral came out for amnesty.

From 2007 on, the
LQB has condemned the bonapartist Cabral
for seeking to install a veritable police
state and criminalize all opposition. We
explained that his government – a “popular
front” which subordinates the workers to
bourgeois sectors by means of an alliance
between the PT, a reformist
(pro-capitalist) workers party, and
parties of the bourgeoisie itself, in this
case the PMDB – had declared war on the
unions and the poor. We noted how Governor
Kill-’Em-All in Rio was propped up by
Lula’s popular-front government in the
Palácio do Planalto, Brazil’s White
House. Lula sent troops of the elite
National Security Force to occupy the
hillside slums of Rio using
counterinsurgency tactics they perfected
while acting as mercenary troops in the
imperialist occupation of Haiti. At the
same time we warned that the PSTU, which
sometimes tries to disguise itself as
Trotskyist, was
seeking to ally with the Militarized
State Police (see “Luta
operária contra a frente popular
militarizada do PMDB e do PT no Rio de
Janeiro,” Vanguarda Operária
No. 10, May-June 2008). On marches, in the
SEPE-RJ and in the trade-union federation
led by the PSTU, Conlutas, the CLC has
fought against any participation by the
police.

The
"governator" Sérgio Cabral Jr.
reviews the elite police of the
National Security Force, January 2007.
(Photo: Silvia Izquierdo/AP)

Today the
scenario is being repeated. The PSOL,
which claims to support demilitarization
and even disarming of the firemen, doesn’t
mention this controversial issue in its
amnesty motion. Meanwhile, these ex-PTers
support the “just struggle of the Rio
firemen” to raise their salaries to the
level of the militarized police (PSOL-RJ
statement, 6 June). The PSTU has been even
more enthusiastic, with a flamboyant
exhibition on its web site on “The Days In
Which Rio Was Painted Red” (the color of
the “striking” firemen). It distributed
thousands of stickers with the slogan, “We
Are All Firemen.” The PSTU proclaims, “A
red tsunami takes the city and spreads
over the state.” It foresees that
the present situation could advance to the
point where it gives rise to a “Cabral
Out” movement.[1]
In the June 12 demonstration by the
firemen (and militarized police) along the
Copacabana beachfront, which they put at
50,000 participants, Rio PSTU leader Cyro
Garcia declared that “the winds of North
Africa and Europe are beginning to blow
here.” A reader might conclude that the
city was about to explode with class
struggle. So are we going to have
barricades in the squares in the coming
days?

The “red tsunami”
not only swept with it the reformist PSOL
and PSTU, which openly support capitalism,
but also various centrists who combine
pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and a
practice which doesn’t infringe on the
bourgeois order. Most notably in this
respect, the Partido Causa Operária
(PCO – Workers Cause Party) called on
working people to “completely support the
struggle of the firemen” (Causa
Operária, 12 June). The PCO
labeled the BOPE “fascist,” citing the
attack on the Fire Corps headquarters as
proof. It rightly criticizes the PSOL for
praising the Pacification Police Units
(UPPs) which have placed various Rio favelas
(slums) “under a state of siege.” It
mouths a few words about demilitarizing
the firemen, but neglects to mention that
the firemen’s struggle is for their
conditions to be closer
to those of the other “auxiliary military
forces,” the militarized state police. And
why don’t they comment on the fact that
these same firemen participate
in
imposing the UPPs, as they recently
did in the occupation of the Mangueira
slum district?

“The
action was coordinated by the Secretariat
of Security, by the Militarized and Civil
State Police, with the support of the
Brazilian Navy (the Marine Corps), the
Federal Police, the Fire Corps and the
Public Defender’s office.”

–O
Globo, 20 June

At the same time,
a tiny Coletivo Lenin, despite its
orthodox Trotskyist pretensions, followed
the example of the PSTU by writing, in a
June 11 note on its blog, that “All
working people and combative youth of
the city should unite in solidarity with
the rebel firemen.”

Other centrists
criticize the PSTU for its support for the
firemen. The Liga Bolchevique
Internacionalista (LBI) writes, in a June
6 note on its site, that “we cannot
support the demands of the firemen’s
movement.” It prioritizes the demand for
demilitarization of the Corps, noting that
its military character derives from
clauses of the 1988 Constitution (Article
144). It criticizes the “offensive against
the poor population of the favelas”
by the Cabral government, but is silent
about and doesn’t explain how the firemen
are part of this. Nor does it mention the
main auxiliary military function of the
firemen: the
heavy participation of militarized
firemen in the Rio “milicias,”
that is, in the extra-official death
squads which terrorize the hillside
slums. In reality, the LBI would like to
support the firemen if the latter would
only change their demands a bit.

Armed
fireman in the Corps headquarters in
Rio de Janeiro, July 2008. (Photo: Marcelo
Carnaval/O Globo)

The Liga
Estrategia Revolucionária-Quarta
Internacional (LER-QI, Revolutionary
Strategy League – Fourth International),
part of the Trotskyist Faction (FT) led by
the Argentine Socialist Workers Party
(PTS), has taken a harder stance against
the firemen’s “strike.” The LER’s 5 June
declaration was titled, “No Support to the
Repressor Sérgio Cabral or to the
Firemen’s Mutiny.” It points out that the
firemen want to continue to be auxiliary
military forces, demanding salaries equal
to those of the militarized police; it
mentions the connection of the firemen to
paramilitary actions (like the 1981 bomb
attack on the Riocentro convention center)
and that they are “the backbone of those
who kill, repress and extort from various
communities in the state.” What, then, is
the proposal of the LER? “The PSTU and
Conlutas must take the lead in organizing
the struggle against capitalist
exploitation and state repression, which
means not defending institutions of
repression but instead to fight for the
dissolution of all organs of repression….”
Everywhere and always, the LER’s watchword
is to make the PSTU/Conlutas fight.

In this manner,
the LER functions as a pressure group on a
reformist party and the union federation
it leads, which only seek to modify
capitalism rather than bringing it down.
This empties the LER’s more radical calls
of any value, because it is perfectly
obvious that the PSTU and Conlutas are not
going to break the framework of bourgeois
rule. With its perspective of a bourgeois
“democratic revolution” – a legacy of the
PSTU’s mentor, the late Nahuel Moreno –
the Morenoites of our day, by rejecting proletarian
revolution, tail after distinctly
anti-democratic forces … like the police.
This is not just a political choice: the
social base of the PSTU is in the
trade-union bureaucracy, whose job is to
control the ranks by seeking an accord
with the bosses, while the PSOL is based
on the elected officials of the bourgeois
parliamentary system. Even though the LER
and the FT make posthumous criticisms of
Moreno and say they have broken with
Morenoism, in practice they follow the
same “democratist” political line. In
Argentina, the PTS has just formed a Left
and Workers Front on the basis of a
reformist electoral program – a typical
propaganda bloc, which if it prospers
would be the doorway to a popular front.

Who Are the
Militarized Firemen And What Do They Want?

In many counties,
firemen, even though they may feel close
to the police in the sense of being part
of “uniformed services,” are distinct
entities. The police are part of the
“special bodies of armed men” who
constitute the backbone of the capitalist
state; they are professional repressors.
Firemen fight fires and give aid – they
are not armed. In Mexico during May Day
parades, the police are booed while the
firemen (part of the civil administration)
are cheered. In Brazil also, many see the
firemen as lifesavers. That’s why their
propaganda in which they proclaimed
themselves heroes had an impact.

However, reality
is different. In particular during the
military dictatorship that lasted form
1964 to 1985, the corps of firemen were
put under the command of the militarized
state police and participated in the
repression. Even after the fall of the
dictatorship, they were designated as
“military forces, an Army reserve.”
Concretely, the “Military Fire Corps of
the State of Rio de Janeiro” has since
1995 been under command of the Secretariat
of Public Security, its members are
soldiers of the state military forces (as
is also the case with the militarized
police) with military ranks (private,
corporal, sergeant, captain), they are
commanded by colonels and subject to
military discipline.

The military
character of Brazilian firemen is not only
a question of laws and regulations. They
receive military training. One third of
the Rio corps, more than 5,000 firemen, is
officially armed – “a small army,” as O
Globo (19 June) noted. Moreover,
they are authorized to have up to three
arms (a revolver, a shotgun and a
carbine), whereas the militarized police
can only (officially) have two revolvers.
And even though they are supposedly
prohibited from using them while on duty,
these arms are frequently used against the
population. Although the government
pretends that there is a war between the
“forces of law and order” and the militias
which kill with impunity in the favelas,
no one in Rio is ignorant of the fact that
“the paramilitary forces are led, almost
entirely, by state public agents: civil
police, militarized police, militarized
firemen and agents of Desipe (prison
officers), as well as by members of the
Armed Forces,” as the Final Report of the
Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on
Militias in the State of Rio de Janeiro
(14 November 2008) concluded. A large
portion of those leaders are militarized
firemen.

The scope of the
bloodbath in the morros,
the hillside slums, of Rio is horrifying.
Of the 5,000 people killed every year in
the state of Rio de Janeiro – a homicide
rate without comparison internationally –
more
than 1,000 are killed by the police,
both militarized and civilian, three times
as many as in São Paulo. Even
though they are classified as “killed
while resisting arrest,” the large
majority of these deaths are summary
executions, according to prosecutors and
even some police officials. And almost
half (45%) of the other, non-official
murders are carried out by the militias (O
Estado de S. Paulo, 1 June). We’re
not talking here about crimes of passion,
gunfights with drug traffickers or rogue
cops. What we have here is a whole system
for control of the population by the
“auxiliary military forces” of the
capitalist state. And now the
militarized firemen, many of whom form the
axis of this system, want to raise their
salaries, status and “working conditions”
to the level of the militarized police –
which would give them greater power to
increase their paramilitary domination
over the poor who reside in the favelas.

Militarized firemen, with
soldiers and officers together, during
the June 12 march in Rio, where they
marched with militarized state police
and striking teachers, thanks to PSTU
and PSOL union leaders.
(Photo: SOS Bombeiros)

Left: PSTU sticker, “We Are All
Firemen.”

Take a look at
the demands of the militarized Rio
firemen: they want, first of all, “to
return to the Secretariat of Public
Security or Civil Defense” (feeling
themselves diminished by being assigned to
the Secretariat of Health during the
campaign against dengue fever). This was
immediately agreed to by Cabral, who
created a new Secretariat of Civil
Defense. Secondly, they want to raise
their salaries to the level of militarized
police in the Federal District (the
capital, Brasília, which has the
highest salaries in the country for this
sector), which the militarized police in
Rio are also seeking. They are demanding
that the federal Congress approve the bill
for a constitutional amendment (PEC 300),
which would inscribe the equalization of
all militarized (but not civil) forces in
the Constitution. And finally, they want
amnesty. The mass arrest of the firemen by
Cabral was a bonapartist measure which
could later be used against the working
class, constituting a threat to democratic
rights in general. However, the amnesty
which they are pushing for goes beyond
this: it would add a new article to
Federal Law 12.191 of 2010, which
amnestied militarized police and firemen
in their “labor” movements from 1997 to
2010, extending this to include any action
by these military forces during 2011. This
would be a carte
blanche stimulating bonapartist
actions by these military forces, as
occurred in 1997.

Is it possible
that the Brazilian parliament would
concede such an amnesty to any sector of
working people? It’s inconceivable. The
reason for the almost unanimous agreement
by the bourgeois parties to the amnesty
law is that they recognize that they
depend on the military and paramilitary
forces, which are the backbone of the
capitalist state and which they view as
essential in order to maintain their class
rule over the working people and rural and
urban poor. Some sectors would still like
to “demilitarize” the corps of firemen and
even “disarm” them. This was the proposal
by Rio state deputy Marcelo Freixo (PSOL)
and of the Final Report of the commission
of inquiry on the militias which he led.
However, the bills embodying this have
gone nowhere. Even if the militarized
firemen were separated from the
militarized police, this would be no
guarantee that the function of the firemen
as an auxiliary military force, which is
largely based in their extra-official
positions of leadership, would change.

The “strike” of
the Rio de Janeiro firemen is not
a movement of workers against the
employer-state as part of the class
struggle against capitalist rule, but
instead represents an effort by a sector
of the repressive apparatus to improve its
position and remuneration as an “auxiliary
military force” of capital, distinct from
civilian public employees and in
conjunction with the militarized police
and even with the top commanders of the
Corps. If anyone had any doubts about the
reactionary
nature of the movement, all you have to do
is cast a glance at the banners in the
demonstrations which proclaim,
“Militarized Police and Firemen United”
and consider the fact that the leaders of
the firemen’s movement, who are officials
(captains) rather than soldiers, joined
with the militarized police to form a
“United Front of Public Security
Entities.”

Trotsky:
“Policemen Are Ferocious, Implacable
Enemies”

Leon Trotsky, in Red Square,
Moscow, 1920. Trotsky wrote of Germany:
“The
worker who becomes a policeman in the
service of the capitalist state, is a
bourgeois cop, not a worker.”

In its first
congress in July 2008, Conlutas (led by
the PSTU), seeking to distinguish itself
from the CUT (Single Union Federation, a
principal support of the governing PT),
and following the failure of its projected
fusion with the Intersindical labor
federation (led by the PSOL and other left
currents), baptized itself “a combative,
class-struggle coordinating body.” It’s a
curious idea of “class struggle” that
includes the members of the repressive
apparatus of the capitalist state as part
of the proletariat. It’s not just a matter
of the militarized firemen: the PSTU and
Conlutas have for some years avidly sought
to unionize the police “sector,” both
civil and militarized. So avidly, in fact,
that “unions” and associations of police
participated in the Conlutas congress, and
the PSTU defended their presence tooth and
nail on the pretext of “represent[ing] the
whole of the working class.” Against this
dangerous and treacherous thesis, the
Comitê de Luta Classista insisted in
its founding program (1997): “Trade unions
belong to the working class, not to the
bourgeoisie and its agents… police (of any
sort) are not part of the working class,
they are the armed fist of the
bourgeoisie.”

Immediately
following the formation of the CLC, this
fundamental point of its program proved to
be of great current importance in the face
of “strikes” by the military police and
firemen in 1997 throughout the country.
The PSTU bragged of having ostentatiously
supported this “rebellion” in Belo
Horizonte, where it was led by the Shock
Battalion of the Minas Gerais militarized
state police, which was “accustomed to
repressing our strikes” (Opinião
Socialista, 3 July 1997). These
Morenoites made a shameful appeal for
unity between these “workers in uniform”
(the military police!) and “their unarmed
brothers”. Other reformist tendencies did
the same. Combate Socialista (25 June
1997), a Morenoite current inside the PT
(now part of the PSOL), proclaimed: “Total
Support to the Strike of the Minas
Police.” O
Trabalho, another pseudo-Trotskyist
current (followers of the late Pierre
Lambert) in the PT, counted the
leader of the “union” of civil police of
the state of Alagoas in its ranks. The
ex-Maoist PCdoB campaigned in the UNE
(National Student Union, which it has
controlled for years) on the watchword,
“The people and police united, will never
be defeated,” at the same time as it
called for disarming the population.

Against this
support to the police mutiny, the Liga
Quarta-Internacionalista declared: “No to
coalitions with the bourgeoisie and its
police!” (Vanguarda Operária
No. 2, August-October 1997). We said
loudly that “the militarized police are
enemies of the working class and we fight
for the removal of all sorts of police
from the CUT.” We quoted the words of the
great Bolshevik revolutionary Leon
Trotsky, which we had already published in
the first issue of VO,
warning against illusions in the working
class about the German police on the eve
of the taking of power by Hitler’s Nazi
fascists:

“The
fact that the police was originally
recruited in large numbers from among
Social Democratic workers is absolutely
meaningless. Consciousness is determined
by environment even in this instance. The
worker who becomes a policeman in the
service of the capitalist state, is a
bourgeois cop, not a worker.”

–What
Next? Vital Questions for the German
Proletariat (January 1932)

July 1996,
Volta Redonda municipal workers made
history by voting to drop police from
membership in the union (SFPMVR).
Signs say: “Bourgeois Courts, Hands
Off Our Union,” “Bosses' Justice,
Militarized Police and Municipal
Guards – Get Out of the SFPMVR.” (Photo: Comitê de Luta
Classista)

Recently, various
centrist groups have reproduced the same
quote. While they only use Trotsky’s words
in order to pressure the PSTU or PCO, we
sought from the beginning to put
into practice the Trotskyist program.
In July 1996, the Union of Public
Employees of the City of Volta Redonda
(SFPMVR) in the state of Rio de Janeiro,
led by several comrades of the recently
founded LQB, made history by
disaffiliating policemen (municipal
guards) from the union. For this genuinely
class-struggle action, they were sharply
repressed by the bourgeois courts, aided
by the whole of the left, including the
PT, PCdoB, PSTU, LBI, Causa
Operária and other left tendencies.

Currently, in
order to justify its ruinous policy of
embracing the “strike” by the militarized
firemen of Rio, the PSTU published a
lengthy article (written by its main
leader, Eduardo Almeida, and a colleague)
attacking the LER-QI, “Polemic: Why It’s
Correct to Support the Struggle of the
Firemen.” In this text, the PSTU claims
that its support for these auxiliary
military forces is an expression of the
military strategy of the Third (Communist)
International to “split the bourgeois
armed forces before the insurrection.”
Today, in contrast to its position in
1997, the PSTU accepts that, “Obviously
the police are not part of the proletariat
and work in a repressive instrument of the
bourgeois state, part of the
superstructure in the service of the
ruling class.” But it immediately adds
that, “because they are recruited from the
proletariat, the police also sell their
labor power and suffer the abysmal quality
of life as does any other worker, since
they receive low wages” and therefore
“they can be split.” In other words, the
PSTU wants to split the police by
supporting their “strikes,” treating them
as if they were workers. This opportunist
reasoning is diametrically opposed to the
revolutionary position of Trotsky in
Germany in the 1930s.

In peddling the
fairy tale that its current policies
follow those of the Third International of
Lenin and Trotsky, the PSTU equates the
police with soldiers in the army. Yet
there is a big difference between soldiers
subject to obligatory military service
(conscription), as is the case in Brazil,
and police who are voluntarily recruited
to an institution of repression. Trotsky
himself, in The
History of the Russian Revolution
(1930), gives a vivid description of the
distinction made by the Russian workers
between the police and soldiers during the
February 1917 Revolution:

“Toward
the
police the crowd showed ferocious hatred.
They routed the mounted police with
whistles, stones, and pieces of ice. In a
totally different way the workers
approached the soldiers. Around the
barracks, sentinels, patrols and lines of
soldiers stood groups of working men and
women exchanging friendly words with the
army men.”

Later on in the
same chapter, he writes:

“The
police are fierce, implacable, hated and
hating foes. To win them over is out of
the question…. It is different with the
soldiers: the crowd makes every effort to
avoid hostile encounters with them; on the
contrary, seeks ways to dispose them in
its favor, convince, attract, fraternize,
merge them in itself.”

As we see, in
Germany and Russia, Trotsky had the same
policy toward the police, and he
distinguishes them from soldiers.

What of the
militarized police and militarized firemen
in Brazil today? It’s one thing to have
illusions in the British police, the
famous bobbies who had the (never
justified) fame of being unarmed. There
also we reject any presence of police in
the trade-union movement, because they are
class enemies of the working people. But
in Brazil, a country with innumerable
massacres carried out by the Militarized
Police, to think that the police are, or
should be treated like, “workers in
uniform” can lead to deadly
misunderstanding. The police are
professional repressors: this is the job
they carry out, whether in the BOPE, the
Shock Battalion or the Militarized Police
as a whole. The militarized firemen are,
precisely, auxiliary military forces –
that is, they aid the militarized
police. They aid the Army and the
National Security Force which Cabral
invited to Rio in 2007 to impose “law and
order.” As we already saw in its present
“strike,” the Rio fireman are seeking a
closer equivalency with their “brother”
policemen. On top of this, there is the
role of the militarized firemen in leading
the militias which keep the Rio slums in a
state of siege, which would only be made
worse with better wages and working
conditions for the Corps.

“Demilitarizing”
the Militarized Firemen?

Militarized police and
militarized firemen of the state of
Alagoas on “strike,” July 1997. The PSTU
gave “total support” while the LQB warned
against any support to these professional
assassins. (Photo: Marco
Antônio/AP)

So what then is
the alternative? Virtually the entire
Brazilian left, both those who support the
“strike” (PSOL, PSTU, PCO and other
smaller groups) and those who criticize it
call for “demilitarizing” the firemen. For
some, such as the LBI, this is their main
slogan in the dispute; others, such as the
LER-QI, give less importance to it.
(Interestingly, when a teacher from the
SEPE-RJ who is a member of the PSTU dared
to pronounce the word “demilitarization”
in his speech during the occupation of the
steps of the Rio Legislative Assembly, he
was rejected by the firemen.) Certainly
there is no reason why a civil service
such as putting out fires, being
lifeguards on the beaches and saving
people in danger needs to be a military
force. But what does it mean to raise
demilitarization of the firemen as a
slogan. In the Report on the parliamentary
inquiry into the militias, which was
unanimously approved by the state
Legislative Assembly and forwarded to the
federal Congress by Deputy Marcelo Freixo
of the PSOL, demilitarization is presented
as a measure to regularize and make
repression less arbitrary and more
efficient in the name of “defense of the
Democratic State of Laws.” That does not
mean making them any less violent.

Thus the Report
proposes: “20.
Disarmament/demilitarization of the Fire
Corps, in view of the quantity of
participation by its members in militia
activities, in addition to, as is well
known, various other criminal activities
above all due to their possession of
firearms.” This proposal was preceded by,
“11. Creation of a Chamber for Repression
of Organized Crime, involving specialized
organs of the Civil Police, the Public
Prosecutor and Court system.” Also: “16.
Enabling the Public Prosecutor to
factually and effectively exercise an
external supervision of the Police, as
well as supervising the whole of the
security system.” Yet substituting greater
control of the favelas
by the official police (which murders with
impunity more than 1,000 residents a
year), as opposed to the present control
by paramilitary groups led by militarized
police and militarized firemen, isn’t
exactly a step forward from the point of
view of the working people. Moreover, this
raises the question: who exactly is going
to carry out the demilitarizing (and
disarming!) of the militarized firemen?

Interestingly,
the PSTU, in its main article on the
firemen’s struggle, opposes
disarming the militarized firemen!
“But, pay attention firemen and policemen,
demilitarizing doesn’t mean disarming.” So
it is announcing that these forces can
keep the pistols, shotguns and rifles that
are frequently used to intimidate and
subjugate the poor people. The PSTU is
offering, in its supposed effort to
“divide” the military forces, to guarantee
the continuation of the rule of the
militias in the slums! In any case, even
if the law calls for it, the firemen are
not about to surrender their firearms,
particularly in the present climate of
insecurity which reigns in the morros
and other neighborhoods of Rio. Nor are
they going to peacefully hand over the
economic basis of their domination: “sales
of gas, alternate means of transportation,
and the ‘gatonet’ (cat net, or pirate
cable TV service) and … clandestine
security services,” as Deputy Freixo said
in an interview with O Dia
(5 September 2010). This economic power
could not exist without a connection with
legal enterprises, from the gas agencies
to companies like Sky-TV (known as
“sky-meow” in the favelas).[2]

In addition to
the “demilitarization” preached by the
bourgeois and reformist parties, whose aim
is to regularize the system of repression,
the LER-QI offers a democratist utopia: in
its article of 5 June it calls on the PSTU
and Conlutas, as usual, to “fight for the
dissolution of all organs of repression.”
One has to ask: who
would dissolve the police repressive
apparatus, and how
would it perform this feat? In several
articles in recent years criticizing the
PSTU, the LER simply repeats its call for
“dissolution” without further explanation.
It thereby implicitly suggests that this
could be accomplished without overthrowing
the present bourgeois state. But when, in
November 2010, in the midst of the massive
uproar provoked by the brutal police
occupation of the Complexo do
Alemão hillside slum, the PSTU came
out for “dissolution of the police,” the
LER had to admit that this was “as we have
always called for,” but insisted, “When
this party [the PSTU] calls for dissolving
the police it is in order to reform the
police.” (“A democratic police is
impossible” says an article by the LER of
3 December 2010.) In reality, this is a utopian
reformist conception, whether coming
from the mouths of the PSTU or the LER.

The illusion: the PSOL praises
Cabral’s “Pacification Police Units,”
shown here playing with babies in a
nursery in the favela Cidade de Deus
(City of God). (Photo:
Lalo de Almeida/New York Times)

The PSTU has the
virtue of explicitly laying out its view:
it wants to “put an end to the present-day
police, to investigate and arrest all of
its rotten gang, and create a new one. The
new police would have to be organized in a
radically different way than the
present-day one.” There would be no
distinction between civil and militarized
police (“it serves no purpose”), there
would be “more democratic liberties” for
the police and “its commanders and
officers would be elected by the
population where they live” (Eduardo
Almeida, “How to Confront Urban Violence?”
article by the PSTU dated 27 November
2011). To underline the “realistic”
character of its proposal, Almeida writes
that “the election of local police chiefs
is practiced in many countries, even in
the United States”! Yes indeed, and in the
U.S. state of Arizona the fascistic
sheriff of Mariposa County, who organizes
paramilitary bands to hunt down
undocumented immigrants, is elected by
popular vote. How great a “democratic
advance” is that! In the present climate
of insecurity and hysteria over “crime”
instigated by the bourgeois media and
politicians, the program of cleaning up
the police and electing their chiefs could
lead to legalizing the death squads.

The utopian idea
that without bringing down capitalism it
would be possible to “dissolve” the
repressive military apparatus in Brazil,
which serves to brutally subjugate the
starving legions despite welfare programs
like “Fome Zero” (Zero Hunger), is absurd.
In this epoch of decaying capitalism, it
will take a social revolution to win basic
democratic rights.

Despite the
reformist character of the PSTU’s call,
the LER-QI responds generously, “The PSTU
is attempting to find a theoretical and
programmatic solution based on
revolutionary tradition.” The LER claims
that, “As a lesson from the Commune, the
police was dissolved.” Yet this was not
the lesson drawn by the great Marxists
from the experience of the 1871 Paris
Commune. The conclusion drawn by Karl Marx
at the height of the Commune was, “the
next attempt of the French Revolution will
be no longer, as before, to transfer the
bureaucratic-military machine from one
hand to another, but to smash it.” On the
eve of the Russian October Revolution of
1917, Lenin stressed: “The words, ‘to smash the
bureaucratic-military machine,’ briefly express
the principal lesson of Marxism regarding
the tasks of the proletariat during a
revolution in relation to the state” (The
State and Revolution
[August-September 1917]). Alternatively,
Lenin spoke of crushing, suppressing,
demolishing and destroying the state
apparatus by means of revolution, but
never of “dissolving” it as if this is
something that could be decided by a
bourgeois-democratic assembly concerning
some secondary state agency.

The PSTU’s recent
polemic against the LER begins and ends
with the characterization, “a scandalous
error.” This is an implicit response to
the article by the LER, “The Scandalous
Position of the PSTU in Defense of the
Police” (Palavra Operária, 23
April 2008). However much they scandalize
each other, as we remarked above, they
both share the same “democratist” outlook
contrary to the struggle for socialist
revolution. If the former seek to get
along with the murderous police, the
latter use the language of bourgeois
liberal defenders of “human rights” who
are guided by “democratic” imperialism. As
against democratic-reformist illusions
about demilitarization and dissolution of
the repressive organs, the Comitê de
Luta Classista (the trade-union tendency
linked to the Liga
Quarta-Internacionalista) has fought for
years to expel any and all police from the
unions and to mobilize the power of the
unions in defense of the oppressed. Thus
in June 2008, the CLC introduced – and the
SEPE-RJ approved – a motion following the
kidnapping and murder of three black
youths by the army in the favelas:

“The
tentacles of the militarized popular front
of class collaboration in the state of Rio
de Janeiro have built a bridge of
repression in the slums from the African
population of Rio to that of Haiti,
training there and killing here, training
here and killing there…. We call on the
SEPE to join with the residents to carry
out protests and mainly to mobilize the
power of the working class…. EXPEL THE
BRAZILIAN TROOPS FROM THE FAVELAS
OF RIO AND HAITI!”

The Struggle to
Build a Trotskyist Party in Brazil

The
reality: police attack the favela
Jacarezinho during the occupation of
the Complexo do Alemão, 24
November 2010. As the motion of the
SEPE-RJ, introduced by the CLC,
demanded: Mobilize the working class
to throw the troops out of the Rio
slums and out of Haiti!
(Photo: Sérgio Moraes/Reuters)

It is a truism to
say that there is no solution to the
problems of crime and police violence
under capitalism. Any social democrat or
bourgeois sociologist will say it. The
question is, what conclusion is drawn from
this? After militarized police murdered 30
people in a massacre in the Baixada
Fluminense (an impoverished working-class
region outside of the city of Rio) in
2005, the worst slaughter in the state’s
history, when calls were raised to
“dissolve all the repressive bodies” (put
forward by the sociologist Luis Mir) and
for the “extinction of the militarized
police and the formation of another public
security agency of a strictly civilian and
technical character” (put forward by the
Movement for Land, Work and Freedom, a
tendency inside the PSOL), we insisted on
the need to “Mobilize the working people
for workers and peasants self-defense”
(“El Brasil de Lula – Tierra de masacres”
[Lula’s Brazil: Land of Massacres],” El
Internacionalista No. 5, May 2005):

“In
situations such as presently prevails in
Brazil, when the urban and rural working
people confront private militias of the
employers and death squads, it is
necessary to raise to the mass
organizations of the exploited the call to
form workers
and peasants self-defense groups.”

Noting how an
unarmed population aids violent criminals
and murderous police and military, we
called to fight against any arms control
law. Stressing the need to combine
mobilization in the factories and the bairros,
we pointed to the important petrochemical
and metalworking sectors in the region,
and also to the presence of the teachers
union, the SEPE-RJ:

“With
a class-struggle leadership, it would be
possible to organize working-class self
defense in the Baixada Fluminense and the
city of Rio. But this requires a political
struggle against the pro-capitalist labor
bureaucracy subordinated, directly or
indirectly, to the popular front.”

This bureaucracy
is not limited to the now pro-government
CUT, or to even more right-wing labor
federations such as Força Sindical.
The leaders of Conlutas, of SEPE-RJ and of
the health workers union Sinsprev-RJ –
that is, the PSTU and PSOL – and of the
Intersindical (led by the PSOL) are also
intransigently opposed to independent
action by the working people, seeking to
place their struggles at the tail end of
the capitalist state, in this case through
support for the military firemen and
police “in struggle.” (When the PSTU
refers to “self-defense associations” it
is in order to ask permission from the
state to “protect ourselves against
bandits,” not from attacks by the police.)
In reality, these sectors of the left are
making a political bloc with other
bourgeois sectors in a substitute
“militarized popular front.” In order to
combat the whole
of the bourgeoisie and attack the economic
bases of the militias, it is necessary to
put forward a program of transitional
demands – including a massive plan of
public works under workers control,
notably constructing millions of houses;
and fighting unemployment by shortening
the workweek with no loss in pay – that
point to the expropriation of capital
through socialist revolution. We also
demand the cancelling of all laws
criminalizing or regulating the use or
sale of drugs: Down with the “war on
drugs,” which serves as a cover for the
class war against working people, blacks
and the poor, particularly in the
impoverished neighborhoods of the favelas
and morros,
which serve as a training ground for
Brazilian troops who murder the poor
people of Haiti.

Above all, in
order to carry out a revolution it is
indispensable to have a deep knowledge and
understanding of the nature of the
bourgeois state. Throughout Latin America
there has been much confusion about the
relation between the police and the
workers movement. At the end of September
2010, parts of the left in Ecuador
supported a police mutiny, arguing that
they were other “workers” threatened by
the bourgeois populist government of
Rafael Correa, when in fact this action by
the police was linked to a coup attempt by
sectors of the Armed Forces.

In Brazil, the
equating of the police and workers comes
from the corporatist tradition of
Getúlio Vargas’s Estado
Novo (New State), and more recently
from the Workers Party that considers all
state employees to be “public servants.”
At bottom, both support to “strikes” by
police and militarized firemen and
proposals for the
“democratization/demilitarization” of
these corps are derived from the
social-democratic conception of the
supposed “neutrality” of the state, which
has become the registered trademark of the
PT which claims to “govern for all” – that
is, treating as equals the rich and poor,
as if there were no social classes. This
is the opposite of the Marxist
understanding that the state is an
instrument of the rule of capital for the
repression of the exploited and oppressed.

The polemical
struggle around the movement of the Rio
firemen throws a sharp light on the fact
that the great majority of Brazilian
parties and groups who claim to be
Trotskyist in reality are social
democrats, whose perspectives are strongly
influenced by their origins as tendencies
within Lula’s PT. When they speak of
“socialism with freedom and democracy”
(PSOL), of a “democratic revolution” (as
do the Morenoites of the PSTU, from Egypt
to Brazil), or even when they reject that
bourgeois-reformist vision (in the case of
the ex-Morenoites of the LER), their
perspectives are counterposed to the
authentic Trotskyist struggle for
socialist revolution. The controversy over
the militarized firemen underscores anew
the vital importance of building a revolutionary
workers
party based on the Trotskyist
program of permanent
revolution, which fights for a
workers
and peasants government. To
carry out an agrarian revolution in the
countryside or to defeat imperialism in
Libya, to combat repression by Brazilian
military forces in Haiti and in the morros
and favelas of Rio, requires a
revolutionary leadership to lead the
working people in the struggle for workers
power, and to extend the revolution
throughout the Americas and into the
entrails of the imperialist monster. ■

[1]
A reference to the “Collor Out”
movement in 1992 which backed by
students, youth, labor and much of the
bourgeois media succeeded in driving
the conservative president Fernando
Collor de Melo from office and
subsequently impeaching him over a
series of corruption scandals,
freezing of bank accounts and runaway
inflation.

[2]
The PSTU argues that there are
tensions between the low-paid sectors
of the militarized police and firemen
and the (much better paid) elite
troops of the BOPE. There was an
example of such a conflict in the favela
of Batan (in the western part of the
city of Rio) where journalists of ODia
were kidnapped and tortured in 2007.
The following year, right in the
middle of the publicity about the
parliamentary inquiry into the
militias, it was reported that a
corporal in the Shock Battalion and a
soldier in the militarize state police
threatened a lieutenant in the BOPE.
The reason: the latter had signed a
contract with NetServiço – a
company jointly owned by the Globo
Network of Roberto Marinho) and
Embratel (a subisidiary of Telmex,
owned by Carlos Slim, the third
richest man in the world) providing
broadband Internet access at “popular
prices.” The lower-rank militarized
policemen demanded “an explanation” of
this competition with their
extra-legal gatonet
service, which depends on access to
the signal of Sky Brasil, a company
owned by the same Globo Network and
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. As
you can see, at bottom there was a
conflict between two “armed media
monopolies,” a sort of “public-private
partnership of a new type,” as one
commentator put it ironically.

The 2011
Mutiny By Rio Firemen Is Not the
Same
As the 1910 “Revolt of the
Whip”

João
Cândido,
the “Black Admiral”, during
the Revolt Against the Whip,
November 1910.

Polemicizing
against comrade Cecilia of the
LQB/CLC at an important
meeting of the SEPE-RJ
teachers union, Miguel
Malheiros of the PSTU (who was
rejected by firemen when he
called for their
demilitarization during one of
their demonstrations) made an
decidedly infelicitous
comparison between the mutiny
of the firemen of Rio de
Janeiro and the Revolta
da Chibata (Revolt of
the Whip). The mutiny by the
militarized firemen in Rio
included commanding officers
and demanded equal prestige
and salary with the
militarized police and the
elite Special Operations
Battalion and National
Security Force. In other
words, they are asking for
increased recognition and
improved conditions, in order
to better repress the poor
black population with, shall
we say, “softer” methods,
using powerful water cannons
or, on other occasions, using
riot clubs and more lethal
forms, such as high calibre
firearms.

The
Revolt of the Whip, on the
other hand, was directed
against the officers, so much
so that the unit commander and
three other officers were
killed when they disobeyed
orders from those led by the
“Black Admiral,” João
Cândido, a seaman. The Revolta da Chibata
occurred mainly in order to
eradicate the punishment of
sailors by whipping, a
leftover from slavery which
persisted in the Brazilian
Navy. Whipping had already
been abolished in 1890 after
the proclamation of the
republic in Brazil, which took
place in 1889, the year after
slavery was abolished. Yet in
order to provide sadistic
pleasure to the white officers
nostalgic for the beatings of
black slaves in the public
squares, the government of
Hermes da Fonseca placed this
instrument of torture in the
hands of the Navy command.

Moreover,
the mutineers against the whip
were recruited by force and in
their great majority were
black, assigned to exhausting
manual labor on board the
ships. None were involved in
massacres or murders of the
poor, as around 20% of the
Corps of Firemen are (through
their participation in the
militias in the hillside slums
of Rio de Janeiro), who are
voluntary recruits trained in
military/police repression.

Even
the events which inspired the
1910 revolt had a very
different ideological content
than those motivating the
present-day militarized
firemen of Rio. The Revolt of
the Whip was inspired by the
British workers movement
(Chartism) and mainly by the
Revolt of Battleship Potemkin
in Russia, which took place
after “Bloody Sunday” in
January 1905, when the tsar
ordered the shooting of
thousands of striking workers.
Then in June 1905, seamen on
the battleship ferociously and
justifiably punished the
commanders of the warship due
to the horrible working
conditions and starvation
rations on board. They also
refused to continue the war
against Japan, which had
produced more than 5 million
casualties among the Russia
population in the context of
the 1905 Revolution (the
“dress rehearsal” of the
Russian Revolution of 1917, as
Lenin put it).

As
one can see in comparing the
two mutinies (and not
“strikes”), the mutineers led
by the Black Admiral did not
call for more impressive
warships with powerful cannons
of higher calibre, or to use
water cannon on the
population, as the militarized
firemen do against strikers
and the population. They also
did not shoot to kill, as the
militarized firemen do, when
they participate in the
occupation of the hillside
slums along with the Special
Operations Battalion and Shock
Troops of the militarized
state police, the National
Security Force or other
sectors of the armed fist of
the capitalists. The Revolt of
the Whip was directed against
the officer corps, whereas the
leaders of the militarized
firemen of Rio hailed the
creation of a Secretariat of
Civil Defense headed by the
commander of the Corps of
Militarized Firemen as a
“great victory.”